Low, mid, high level language, what's the difference?

Question

I\'ve heard these terms thrown around describing languages before, like C is not quite a low level language, C++ is a mid level, and Python is a High level

Answer 1

They aren't absolute. They are all relative to what other languages are being used in industry at the time. For example, there was a time when assembly was considered mid-level.

The 'level' is essentially a measure of how abstracted the programmer is from the actual hardware-based operations. In a low level language you might have to care about actual memory locations, whereas in a high-level you just create variables and let the OS handle memory.

A normal CPU processes either 32 or 64-bit instructions. In the simplest form, think of this as an 32 1's and 0's in a row - that's what the processor actually interprets and executes. Writing this directly (machine code) would be the 'lowest-level'.